9:30am, Tues 31 Jan, 2012: Natasha Fish drops her mobile phone in the toilet. 

6:30am, Weds 1 Feb, 2012: I put my phone back together and it works. Jackpot.

Now I have no pretentions to being desperately cool – and neither does my phone; it’s not a BB or HTC, nor is it an iPhone. It’s a humble Nokia 6700 slide.

News out today reveals that Nokia has held on to its number one spot of leading mobile vendor by shipments in Q4 2011 and for the whole of 2011*, with Samsung and Apple in second and third place. However, as you may be aware, things aren’t all rosy for Nokia – the telecoms group posted a loss of €954m in the same quarter, as its $250m partnership with Microsoft failed to make waves, according to City AM.

So what’s the future for Nokia?

It’s looking at extensive restructuring due to a rapidly declining market share and lack of a competitive smartphone device. The brand is expected to suffer a further fall in smartphone ownership because of a slowdown in sales from Symbian (the mobile operating system), which is due to be replaced by the Windows platform.

The solution? Many think that a successful smartphone range under Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft is the key to the future of the Finnish manufacturer, in spite of the continuing popularity of its lower-tech feature phones.

Boden’s new iPad app has left me feeling a bit blaa.

Don’t misunderstand me. It’s nothing to do with this season’s clothes. As ever, with a careful eye, it’s relatively easy to select a few choice pieces that avoid the brand’s yummy mummy reputation and really deliver on the quality/value front.

What the iPad lacks is any clear consideration of how shoppers engage with Boden’s traditional catalogue.

I know I’m not alone among Boden consumers in savouring the prospect of some free time to sit down with the new catalogue. I make myself a cup of coffee and flick through the pages drawing up a short list of items that catch my fancy; I might even turn down the corners of the pages. When truly organised I’ve been known to make a list in the back of the catalogue of items that I want to buy with corresponding page numbers. I might even rip out the pages. Whatever the method, and whether shopping online or going to Boden’s Park Royal store, I need this shopping list. I might repeat this process several times before I make a purchase. I might change my mind about certain items after viewing them a second or third time. I might go online to read reviews and find that people have concerns about the cut, colour or quality. And if I go in store armed with my shopping list I might find, as is often the case, that the colour in the catalogue and online bears absolutely no relation to the actual colour and that the cut is totally wrong for my shape.

Sadly, the app takes none of this behaviour into account. As I experimented with it over the last few days I kept hoping that I’d come across some sort of equivalent to my page turning, page ripping or shopping list/page number annotation habit. There is absolutely nothing to reflect this shopping ritual. I’m sure a good number of loyal Boden customers have developed their own rituals around the arrival of the Boden catalogue. It’s such a shame to see nothing of this kind built into the app. I wonder if Boden even posed the question. Perhaps it will come in a future upgrade.

I for one will remain with the catalogue and use my iPad to buy via my browser, bypassing the Boden app entirely. Moreover it seems to include only a very small collection of the clothes that appear in the catalogue and navigating through the app on the off chance that my item of choice is included would be a pretty tedious process. There’s not even the facility to enlarge the images that appear in the app – this has to be done by clicking through to the online store. The token video featuring kids’ clothing is weak too. Quite simply the navigation is clumsy with too much scrolling involved – purchasing items that feature in a lifestyle shot sometimes requires scrolling down through 4 or 5 frames within the same section, rather than jumping directly to the purchase link for those items. I might have missed a trick, but I don’t think so. And if I have, isn’t the app making me work a little too hard?

Come on Johnnie, you can do better.

Following standard guidelines

We all have a dirty secret. Mine is watching really bad TV just before I go to sleep, usually pretty late. I caught Channel 4’s The Secret of the Shoplifters last week. It was fascinating. Both for an insight into the strategies the light fingered use to get away with their loot and into the mindset and determination of the professionals who are employed by the stores to track and hunt them down.

Several of the latter profiled in the programme took their role as a true vocation, almost a public duty. We saw how they spent hours and hours observing suspects via CCTV in real time. They explained how through experience they were able to interpret how people moved through the store, how they touched and examined goods and therefore what their intent might be. They explained how in time they become true experts in understanding shopper behaviour. Some of those shoppers they followed via CCTV in store had evil intentions, others did not or simply didn’t go through with their plans on that particular occasion.

Suddenly the penny dropped. How familiar the language used by these store professionals sounded. How often do specialist shopper marketing agencies, and others, talk about understanding shopper behaviours and motives? Agencies put a great deal of time and effort into understanding how consumers navigate the store environment, how they shop the category and interact with fixtures, packaging and the product itself. Admittedly in-store security staff will be looking out for criminal behaviour, but because the nature of their role involves an almost full-time observation of a broad range of store customers, criminal and non-criminal, they are placed better than most agency professionals to answer these kinds of questions about shopper behaviour in-store.

It got me thinking to those legendary ad industry stories from the 60s and 70s, apocryphal or not – who knows – of the local wino or pub regular who was recruited by a risk-taking agency head on a whim and who became a legendary creative. Who’s to say there isn’t a role for a former in-store security professional within the agency world?  Whichever agency is the first to announce an audacious appointment of this kind, you can be sure they will stir up a few headlines.

*Disclaimer: might not contain actual science – just theories I’d like someone else to prove for me.

It was my other half that mused over dinner the other night, that Spotify ads had to walk the fine line of being ‘just annoying enough’.

What an interesting point, I thought. There aren’t many services where you have the option of removing ads. Newspapers, TV etc – the ads have to engage and be memorable – even if they irritate the shit out of you. (Go Compare, We Buy Any Car et al obviously use being irritating as hell as a very effective tactic.) You can’t buy an ad-free issue of the Sun.

But Spotify – that’s different. The ads have to be effective, for sure. Advertisers would never buy into a service that they felt was pure annoyance. But at the same time, the ads have to be a disincentive – you have to dislike them enough to want to get rid of them, but not so much that you will abandon Spotify if you can’t afford it.

Spotify

How do they do this?

Repetition and frequency surely play a large part. Before we realised (oh joy!) that our new Virgin Media subscription came with six months’ free Spotify, we were hearing ads at the rate of one every two songs, at times.

Lack of targeting is perhaps another annoying tactic. Am I more likely to buy a car if I like Florence & the Machine, or if I prefer Rizzle Kicks? At least when you watch TV, there is some element of supposition about your likely demographic.

Spotify ads also take no notice of what you’re listening to, as far as I can ascertain. I’m pretty sure that my choice of the Fleet Foxes album was once interrupted by a sexual health message. Ruined.

In short, it’s about bending the advertising rules – relevancy, timing – all the rest – and counting on the fact that this stick is still adequately counteracted by the small carrot of free music, albeit with ads.

And in a way, the ads are themselves an advert – every one drawing your attention to the lovely musical promised land that lies tantalisingly close, if you’d just dip your hand in your pocket for a fiver a month.

Bookshop chain Waterstone’s has revealed that it is ditching the apostrophe to become, simply, ‘Waterstones’.

Apparently, the argument is that “Waterstones without an apostrophe is, in a digital world of URLs and email addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling”. Understandably, organisations like the Apostrophe Protection Society are up in arms.

This isn’t the first time this poor little superscripted comma has run into trouble. Check out Stephen Fry’s amusing tweet and there is also a growing body of opinion that the apostrophe is actually dying out. As Waterstones suggests, online copy and text-speak are hardly doing it any favours.

So what do I think? Speaking as a massively pedantic writer, proof-reader, editor and unashamed Grammar Nazi, I think people who get apostrophes wrong should have their errant copy engraved on stone tablets which are then used to beat them to death. It’s not that hard, people.

And more to the point, without it we’re opening up a great deal of the written word to misinterpretation. It might not be so bad to miss out an apostrophe in a tweet or SMS, but in a legal contract or business email it could make a significant difference.

So my advice is, if you don’t know how to use them just go to the Society’s website at the link above and find out. People are willing to stop giant pandas from dying out, and many of them can’t even be bothered to reproduce. Frankly, apostrophes have far more impact on the modern world.

Having recently been helping out with recruitment here at Velvet, it got me to thinking about how tough it is, contrary to what some might think, to be a good PR.

In a lot of marketing services, you can focus on one thing and be really good at it – and it doesn’t matter if you’re poor at other skills. If you’re incredibly creative but have the organisational skills of a ham sandwich, you can still be a great designer or copywriter. If you like dealing with people but hate numbers, client management is the one for you.

Jack of all Trades

And the list goes on. If all your eggs are in one basket and you’re a consummate salesperson, tech geek or financial whizzkid – but have little or no capabilities outside your specialist field – there’s probably a place for you in a marketing services or digital agency somewhere.

But PR, unfortunately, seems to require all of the above. You have to be creative enough to see the story hooks and be able to suggest new angles; you have to be able to sort through reams of data to get at the core of a piece of research; you have to be able to write flawlessly, with impeccable grammar and spelling; you have to be able to sell your idea to a recalcitrant client or harried journalist; you have to understand social media; you have to be able to cost a project.

I don’t want to come across as suggesting PR is the toughest job in the world. Far from it, and I certainly wouldn’t want to change places with a deep-sea fisherman or firefighter. But still, having seen first-hand how hard it is to find people with all the skills needed to do this job, I’m not surprised that the trade media (and the people I know in the industry) keep talking about the shortage of good people.

Many in the industry say that video is the future. There were figures recently from one of the big retailers, possibly M&S saying that items that were accompanied by video footage sold better than those without. I know that when I’m in shopping mode and browsing online, video can be a useful way of seeing how a garment hangs and moves, how the fabric drapes, where the waist sits and other really important things you simply don’t get via static images.

I hadn’t really grasped how much of a sale clincher it can be however until I bought a dress from Whistles the other day. I’d been flicking through my iPad issue of the Sunday Times Style magazine a few weeks ago, looking at a piece on Christmas party dresses, when out of curiosity I clicked on the video content that was flagged up on the page. I don’t normally do this  – I’ve seen so many duff videos in the past – but on a whim I changed that habit. It was actually a really great little piece of video editorial, putting a range of party dresses through their paces by seeing how they stood up to energetic skating and by inference, the wear and tear of a party environment. Set in Westfield, it was also a great PR piece for the centre and one assumes each of the dresses profiled could be bought there. Because it was a piece of editorial with a strong call to action via recommendation it also was far more effective than a standard catwalk video.

Top marks went to a lovely Whistles dress with feather trimming on the hem. It looked cute, comfortable and sexy. I was sold. I needed to have it. Frustratingly there wasn’t a direct link to the website – missed opportunity guys – as is true of most Sunday Times iPad content. I then lost the impetus for a few days until I happened to be in a Whistles that had the dress in stock (my local Chiswick branch doesn’t) so that I could look at it properly. The Kings Road outlet didn’t have my size, but they did bend over backwards to order it for me from another store and delivered it to my office free of charge within a few days.

Perfect Model Stance…

So, here I am, a delighted owner of a lovely new party dress whose purchase was prompted purely by video. Perfect proof of the pudding.

I’ve been obsessed with zeebox ever since I downloaded it a few weeks ago on my iPad. For anyone who doesn’t know it it’s a really clever app that allows you to seamlessly tune into twitter comments, audience popularity stats and “live zeetags” – further information provided in real time on content or issues mentioned – for a TV programme airing at any given time. It’s sheer genius. It’s heralded as “the best thing to happen to TV since TV,” – quite a statement of intent!

 The Desperate Scousewives

Now I’m not one for reality TV but when I heard that Desperate Scousewives represented a world first in dual screen viewing via a tie up between zeebox and E4 I knew that  I needed to force myself to consume some rubbish TV so that I could be in on the action. The fact that DS took place in my home town simply added to the appeal.

Now don’t get me wrong, there were some really clever things happening. In real time as a piece of music was used I had the chance – via the relevant tag appearing – to buy that track instantly via iTunes. No more frustrating waiting until the credits rolled at the end of the programme to find out what that great snippet of music was – that’s assuming they bothered to reference it at all – so many programmes never do.

It got better; as places such as bars, restaurants and shops were mentioned during the programme they instantly appeared on a Google map within the app. And for those who found the Scouse lingo impenetrable there was a handy instant translation tool.

These and other fancy tricks that zeebox and E4 had developed around the programme content were pretty damn awe inspiring. Yet I was left with  a huge sense of unease. Desperate Scousewives itself was pretty appalling. The constant stream of  hashtagged tweets showed me that I wasn’t alone in my views. Why therefore had zeebox and E4 collaborated to produce a tool that was so stunning around content that was so crap? As a demonstration of the potential of the technology it was brilliant but the banality of the content, which was neither entertaining – excepting the various references to ahem, “beauty” uses of household bleach – nor engaging, was mind-blowing. It made Katie Price look like Einstein. Will it be used as a sticking plaster to mask bad TV? Can we expect a future where interactive trickery of this kind takes preference over quality programme making? Let’s hope not.

Which got me thinking – there are some programmes that lend themselves to the zeebox experience better than others. Of course those scheduling fixtures that demand participation such as X Factor, Strictly and the Eurovision are natural zeebox bedfellows. But what of those programmes that demand a greater concentration?  Admittedly while I like to know what others might be thinking about said film or piece of expressionist art, when viewing this type of content I find myself leaning towards the trusty box in the corner as my main screen and hence my key focus. I know that I might be in the minority camp but I really cannot see a time when, as some predict, the second screen, be it tablet or mobile, will become the dominant of the two screens. Complementary at times, yes. I can’t help feeling that it’s a bit like reading a critique of a novel without having read the novel itself. And most of us know that our teachers generally found us out!

That said, despite the hardly taxing nature of Desperate Scousewives I did find it hard to concentrate simultaneously on the programme itself and the information that zeebox was relentlessly chucking at me.  Shame on me – I didn’t even have a lack of familiarity with the accent or Scouse lingo to blame. Maybe my multi-taking skills are just not up to scratch. And do you know what, while I love zeebox, there’s a time and a place for vegging out and letting content wash all over you without having to react or think too hard. TV does that better than any other media.